In dealing with the issues of rights and citizenship in modern societies, Parsons was very much influenced by T. H. Marshall's account of the successive development of civil, political and social rights in the United Kingdom. Given this, it is appropriate briefly to examine Marshall's contribution – before considering how Parsons integrated it into his broader, more theoretical framework.

T. H. Marshall: civil, political and social rights

With his elegant prose, which systematically eschewed sociological-theoretical jargon, Marshall (1964) based his analysis of citizenship on a rather non-deterministic theory of social differentiation. According to him, citizenship, as a movement for the spread of rights ‘downwards’, began in the seventeenth century together with the development of capitalism and the marked emergence of national consciousness.

But in the seventeenth century ‘rights were blended because institutions were amalgamated’ (1964: 72). It is in the eighteenth century that institutions became less ‘amalgamated’ (in evolutionist terminology, more differentiated), and a process of ‘unblending’ of rights can be discerned, with each category of rights (civil, political, social) beginning to acquire its own logic and dynamic trajectory. The civil aspects of citizenship developed first. Civil rights related to property, free speech, free association and other ‘individual freedoms’ gradually destroyed the feudal principles of social stratification, and durably established the principle of equality under the law. It was therefore in the legal sphere and, more specifically, in the institutional arena of the courts of justice, that we see the first thrust from ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens’, from a situation where different laws and juridical principles applied to different classes, to a situation where all were equal before the major legal codes of the national community.